Footnote

How you feel about this movie might be in some way related to
your attitude about father-son rivalries. Set on a background
of obscure
Israeli academia. In Hebrew. (But also dubbed in Portuguese.)
(But not English.)

Father and son are
Eliezer and
Uriel Shkolnik, respectively. They are both Talmudic scholars
at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Eliezer is old and bitter,
and unpopular in the department. He is (in turn)
crankily dismissive of what he
considers to be the superficial research methods
of his colleagues, including his son's.
Uriel wishes things could be different, but what are you gonna
do?

A symbol of Eliezer's resentment is his decades-long failure to
win the Israel Prize. But this year, he gets a phone call
saying he's won it. Hooray! Problem solved, right?

Well, no. But no spoilers here.

Footnote
was nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar last year.
It was successfully aimed at critics.
For us mere mortals, it is very slow going.

For example, if you zoom in on the DVD box over there,
you'll find that Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly
deemed it "funny and smart". Well, it's funny if
you are inordinately amused
by too many Israeli academics crammed into a very small meeting
room, having to stand up when someone enters or leaves.
I think the Marx Brothers did this better.

Foundation's Edge

Isaac Asimov wrote the original "Foundation Trilogy" back in the
early 50s, and I (as a very young man) remember getting the omnibus
volume as the bait for joining the Science Fiction Book Club: merely
10 cents, plus shipping and handling. Like most impressionable youths,
I thought it was just swell.

Nowadays, I note, you can get the same books, albeit illustrated,
and with an intro by Paul Krugman,
from the Folio
Society, and it will set you back a cool $140 (plus, it appears,
$12.95 shipping and handling.)

[Krugman's intro is available as a PDF here,
and it's mostly free of his dreadful politicizing, so if you're
interested.]

So: about 30 years after the original books came out, the Good
Doctor A wrote this in 1982: Foundation's Edge. And I was
still a young enough man back then to get it from the good
old Science Fiction Book Club. And now, 30 more years after
its original publication, it's part of my Asimov-rereading
project.

The book is set 120 years after the events of Second Foundation,
about halfway into the Seldon Plan, the psychohistorical scheme to
bring civilization back to the galaxy
as quickly as possible after the predicted fall of
the Galactic Empire. The Plan is going smoothly: the First
Foundation thinks it has destroyed the Second Foundation; the Second
Foundation, secure on the Last Planet Anyone Would Suspect, continues
to oversee the Plan's steady unfolding.

In fact, the Plan is going way too smoothly. Each Foundation
has a Brash Young Man (or, as another character puts it: "undiplomatic
young jackass") that realizes this, to the shock and horror
of the respective power structures. Something unknown is going on in
the galaxy, and each jackass is sent on a mission to discover what
that is.

Even after Asimov's decades-long hiatus
from SF novel writing, his style is still there:
almost all the pages consist of people talking to each other.
Things happen, sure, but it's mostly conveyed via stilted dialog.
And things are not what they seem, people not exactly who they seem
to be. (And if you know that, the big plot twist is pretty easy to
see coming.)

But still, it is a pretty tidy ending. And—do I need to
say "Spoiler Alert" for a 30 year old book?—Asimov starts to
tie together all his previous books into a coherent whole,
something he never attempted
in the 50s. (Ever wonder why there were no Three-Laws
robots in the Foundation
series? Find out!)

Unlike 2007, the "scary" hit counts are massively larger than
the "phony" hit counts. What's that mean? Back then, we referred
to the "Wizard of Oz" principle: people find these guys scary, but
they're actually just phony.

That was a light-hearted attempt to explain a much smaller difference.
What now? Maybe months of negative ads predicting the dire
results of the Other Guy winning has turned us into a nation of
quivering sheep huddled in a dark corner?

The fear has (in fact) reached the highest levels. An
actual AP
news story from last year reported on Michelle Obama's
confession to an audience of high school students.

Both candidates are cowering before Mother Nature, according to
Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu, Ace Reporter for
"Arutz Sheva", the Israel National News:

"Frankenstorm" Sandy has scared the wits out of Mitt Romney and
President Barack Obama as it churns northward, leaving death in its
trail while the projected fury of the storm could leave 60 million
people without electricity.

Translation: the storm caused campaigns to alter their schedules. But
give Tzvi some props for colorful writing.

If presidential mask sales at Spirit Halloween stores across the country
are any indication, Obama is in the lead with 63 percent versus Romney
at 37 percent, said Lisa Barr, the company's senior director of
marketing.

"Essentially, what the other side has decided is that they are going to
try to ride fear and anxiety all the way to the ballot box on November
2," he said, at the event organized by the Democratic National
Committee.

And what if Mitt Romney wins instead? "If you're a woman, you should be
very, very scared of that, for many reasons," she said. "And obviously
as a gay person he doesn't believe in me having the same rights, so of
course I'm not happy about that."

Note: Despite her phrasing, I'm pretty sure Ellen did not mean to say,
or even imply,
that Mitt Romney is a gay person. I think Ellen is saying she's
gay. (And I'm not sure, but
I think I've heard that myself at some point in the past.)

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

This is a nice little movie, which IMDB bills as a "Comedy | Drama |
Romance", and Netflix genrifies as "Comedy, Romantic Comedies, Romantic
Dramas, Dramas Based on Contemporary Literature, Dramas Based on the
Book, United Kingdom".

The main characters are Dr. Alfred ("Fred") Jones (played by Ewan McGregor)
and Harriet ("Harriet") Chetwode-Talbot (played by Emily Blunt). Fred is
a low-level bureaucrat in the UK's Fisheries Department; Emily is a
hard-charging consultant hired by Yemeni Sheikh ("Sheikh") Muhammed to
do something totally impractical: engineer a waterway in Yemen
in which salmon can run, breed, and be caught by intrepid
fishermen.

UK troops are getting shot at and blown up in Afghanistan, so the
the UK government, desperate for some good news out of the general
region, swings its mighty weight behind the project. Specifically,
the Prime Minister's Press Secretary Patricia ("Profane Bitch") Maxwell,
(played by Kristin Scott Thomas) starts pulling the strings to make
it all happen.

We get to know Fred and Harriet pretty well. Fred's in a passion-free
marriage; he also has Asperger's. But (as I observed to Mrs. Salad
during the movie),
he's very high-functioning, so it's more like half-Asperger's. (Hah! I
kill me.) Harriet has a boyfriend, a soldier conveniently sent off to
Afghanistan just when Harriet and Fred start working closely on the
project. And you see where this might lead, right?

There's some cynical commentary on British politics; some Yemenis
are bitterly opposed to the project, and proceed in the way folks
in that part of the world do when they disagree: attempt murder
and sabotage.

Not bad, directed competently by Lasse Hellström, but it seems
much longer than the 107 minutes claimed by IMDB. Movies labeled
as comedies are usually funnier, but Emily Blunt is easy on the eyes,
so it kind of evens out.

URLs du (Impending Hurricane) Jour

2012-10-27

Hurricane Sandy has caused some folks in the immediate vicinity
to soil their britches. The University Near Here has curtailed
operations for Monday and Tuesday, giving us non-essential
personnel a sweet long weekend.

I can't (however) figure out how that even makes sense, given
the current storm-track maps at NOAA's
Hurricane Center. But nobody asked me so,…

Pun Salad's official (but unaware, and uncompensated) mascot
Cathy
Poulin has been spotted giving a $5K check to St. Anna School
in Fitchburg, MA. Good for her, good for her employer.

Picture at right. Usually they take the picture of the (literally)
Really Big Check, but this time they took the picture of the Really
Big Thank You Card the school gave in return. Sweet.

For the uninitiated, Cathy is the Director of Public Relations
for Bob's
Discount Furniture, a chain with multiple locations in the
Northeast. She also appears with Bob himself in their irritating
advertisements. And our ISP-provided stats tell us that Googling for
"Cathy Poulin" is the number one reason
people come to Pun Salad.

Bob's advertisements may be irritating, but right now I'd prefer to
watch five hundred of them in a row than see one more dumb political
ad. Thank goodness for TiVo and Netflix.

Gog, leader: Terrible magic visit village before Gog
become leader. Gog take ancient Horse Crown not knowing full extent of
bad magic. Gog pray for guidance; sent vision that virgin sacrifice
please gods, bring rain. Opponent say virgin sacrifice never work. But
Gog see many sign of turnaround, like evil spirit leaving cave and
people buying wheel again. Opponent say stop killing virgin or become
like Land That Money Forgot. But Gog consult many Wizard. Them say: Grow
crop, then stop killing virgin.

Mog, opponent: Gog not make crop die. Mog know this.
Mog know Gog inherit Bad Times after sorcerer enchant puppet. But Mog
say Gog make problem worse with stone tablet that have many word on it.
Gog also ask for our virgin. Tell us he can bring crop back. We give him
many virgin. But no crop! Now Gog want another chance? Mog have 5-step
dance to bring back rain. Mog understand dance; Gog no understand dance.
That difference this election. Also, Gog must be toss from
mountaintop.

Plus ça change…

While others (I'm told) drop a small fortune on PC games and the
high-end hardware necessary to run them seamlessly, I usually just
play
Monopoly
against 3 opponents, each cranked up to "Tycoon" strategy.
Very old style: Mediterranean and Baltic are purple, not brown,
Luxury Tax is $75,
and there are no fancy dice rolls.

You may know that the inventor of Monopoly was a follower of
Henry George and his oddball tax ideas; the game was meant to
illustrate/advocate for the "single tax" Georgist position.

But have you ever wondered how a "true" Georgist single tax might work in
Monopoly?

Adventures in HTML5 Compliance

I've finally completed the dinking of Pun Salad
posts into HTML5 compliance,
at least according to the W3C
Validator, all the way back to post number one in February 2005.
Mostly mechanical tag-tweaking, but I couldn't
avoid at least looking at some of the older content. A mixed bag
of observations:

I know I'm supposed to make some self-disparaging comments
about how silly and amateurish my old posts are. But (as it turns out)
the newer posts are equally silly and amateurish.

Ahem. Just kidding. False modesty aside:
other than gradual changes in my posting style, I think
the old stuff holds up pretty well.

The further back in time I went, the more work it
was to hammer things into compliance. The first few Salad
years were really anarchic, HTML-standardswise.

Technically-illegal
URL characters, mostly
spaces and
ampersands, are tricky, because
most browsers let you get away with using them, and most
sites encourage you to cut-n-paste them. But the Validator
gripes, so they
had to be found
and fixed.

Embarrassingly, back in 2005-2006, I had no idea how to make a compliant
unordered ("bullet")
list, putting in <p> tags in unacceptable
spots. And, as you may have noticed, I use them bullets a lot. Edit, edit,
edit… slowly and tediously.

Speaking of ellipses,
I also had the annoying habit of leaving off the semicolon
of HTML character entities. (E.g.,
&hellip instead of
&hellip;)
I think older browsers
might have taken a more "oh, I know what you meant to do
there" attitude. These days, it just looks lazy and stupid
and ugly. Fixed, I hope.

For some reason, I took a lot of "online quizzes" in the past.
(e.g., "What
military aircraft are you?") and mindlessly cut-n-pasted the HTML
results
into an article.

As it turned out, those quiz composers didn't
much care about HTML5 compliance back then either. In some
cases I just had to give up.

The number of dead links is depressing and embarrassing. (I left
them in, though.) Depressing, because things I thought interesting
enough to link to are now lost;
embarrassing, because sometimes there's no indication
what was going on: essentially, "hey this is neat" with a
non-working link. What was I thinking? We'll never know.

Especially noticeable: YouTube videos that were yanked due
to copyright reasons. (In some cases, I was able to find
alternate sources.)

I also got to remember some bloggers I once linked to all the time,
but now have gone on to… well, wherever you go after you stop
blogging. Examples:

"Robert Musil", the Man Without Qualities: the blog is still there, but the latest post is dated March
2007.

Katie Newmark had the best title for her blog: "A Constrained Vision",
a nod to
Thomas Sowell's
classic book,
A
Conflict of Visions.. But attempting to go there nowadays
brings up "It's
All about Volkswagen", a blog that the
current owner never bothered to post to. A waste of a good URL!

New Hampshire's own Shawn Macomber, doesn't do the blog thing any more
but I found him here.

Virginia Postrel explains
that she now is mainly found at Twitter and Facebook.

And not that it matters, but as I was cranking through the
old articles,
I tried (and I think mostly succeeded) to regularize the
links on my movie/book postings to Amazon and IMDB. I especially
like the look of the "rating plugin" link provided by IMDB.

Echo Park

My book-picking algorithm offered me this choice from the to-be-read
pile, part of my ongoing project to read all Michael Connelly's novels
in publishing-date order.
Echo Park was initially published in October 2006, and
here it is October 2012. So I'm six years behind.

This blog's search functionality tells me that
back in August 2006, I read Connelly's
Void Moon, initially published in
January 2001. So back then, I was slightly over five and a half years
behind.

Disheartening conclusion: uh oh. Given this trend, he's writing them
slightly faster
than I'm reading them. The only solution is to read faster; everything
else is too depressing.

Anyway: this novel is in his Harry Bosch series. Harry is still on the
L. A. Police force, still working crimes in the Open/Unsolved unit.
Bosch's mission is to keep tugging at the loose ends of historical
crimes using new technologies and his famous doggedness.

Here, a new lead has appeared in the case of Marie Gesto, who vanished
from the face of Southern California back in 1996. A demented serial
killer caught (nearly literally) red-handed offers his confession to
the ancient crime (and others) in order to avoid the death penalty.
The D.A., in the midst of a hard-fought political campaign, is
leaning toward accepting the deal.

Only problem is that the 1996 case files now show that the killer
contacted Bosch and his partner back then. And for some reason they
never followed up on this lead. If they had, there was a chance
they could have prevented several subsequent serial slayings. Bosch,
understandably feels pangs of guilt; this goes to the heart
of his raison d'être for being a detective.

Bosch thinks the whole thing smells. And (this is a Michael Connelly
book) he's right. What transpires is page-turning (figurative on the
Kindle, but you know what I mean) drama, corruption,
first-class detection, and violence.

Cars 2

I feel obligated to see all Pixar movies, but I knew I wouldn't
like this one very much. So I didn't go to the
theatre to watch it, and it sat in the Netflix queue awhile.

As you probably know, it's set in a world where cars (and other
machines)
have taken the
place of humans. You can't think about this too hard, otherwise
you'll come to the obvious conclusion: that this is a result of
a successful (but non-radioactive, non-destructive) Terminator scenario,
where all the people have been killed off, and their mechanized
artifically-intelligent killers just
continue on. And (for some reason)
doing pretty much what the humans used
to do, taking over the buildings and roads the humans used to use,
fitting into the roles humans used to fill.
And never mentioning how it all came to happen.

And we're supposed to sympathize with these murderous
things? And
buy the action figures?

The plot, such as it is: a nefarious conspiracy is in motion to deny the
mechanized world access to environmentally-friendly fuel. In opposition
is the Aston-Martiny "Finn McMissile", an experienced British spy
(voiced by good old Michael Caine) and still-wet-behind-the-fenders
agent Holly Shiftwell (Emily Mortimer). The gang from the original
movie, Lightning McQueen, Mater the tow-truck, etc. get looped
into the plot when races using the nice fuel are scheduled. But the
bad guys look to blow the cars up to make the fuel look bad.

In short, the plot is beyond dumb. The script is also not particularly
inspired, with mindless action taking the place of the usual Pixar
wit and imagination.
It is
Pixar, however, so the animation is great and the globe-hopping
locations are impressively pictured.

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Didja see Slumdog Millionaire? How about Downton Abbey?
Do you know how to find BBC America on your cable box? Then
this movie is aimed right between your eyeballs, binky.

An ensemble cast of Brits heads off to India to "outsource their
retirement". There's widow Evelyn (Judi Dench); retired judge Graham
(Tom Wilkinson); Douglas and Jean, a married couple in
difficult financial straits (Bill Nighy and Penelope Wilton, making
a remarkable recovery from that nasty zombie attack a few
years back); gold-digger Madge (Celia Imrie); roving-eyed Norman
(Ronald Pickup); and Muriel (Maggie! Smith!) a retired housekeeper who
needs a hip replacement faster than she can get it in Britain.

And they all come together in the titular hotel, which turns out to be
more ramshackle than advertised, operated by "Sonny" (Dev Patel),
with problems of his own: a forbidden romance, a domineering mom,
financial ruin, a borderline delusional personality.

A lot of stories to tell, but they are told well, and you couldn't
find a better bunch of actors to tell them. There's a mix of comedy and
drama, the latter mostly of the melo- variety.
If you've watched
more than three movies of this type, there's not a lot you won't see
coming, long before it actually comes up on the screen.

Just one last thing: Dame Judi has a dazzling smile, when the script
calls on her to let it out. I've seen her in a lot of movies, but
I can't recall seeing it before.

Roger
L. Simon summed up his debate observations in the headline: "Phony
Town Halls and Candy Crowley's Ego"

The U.S. population clock is currently showing 314,583,682
residents as of October 2012 and yet we are about to hold a "town hall"
debate for our presidential candidates.

How quaint. (The first town hall meeting was held in Dorchester,
Massachusetts, in 1633.)

How completely and utterly phony.

Roger notes that gathering together a bunch of allegedly "uncommitted"
citizens to ask questions is suboptimal. And Candy Crowley was
obviously unwilling to restrict herself
to the role of "moderator", instead wishing
to insert herself into the fray.

Roger wishes for Lincoln-Douglas style debates. Couldn't be worse.

A whole lotta people cried "phony" over a visit by Paul Ryan
to a Mahoning County's [Ohio] St. Vincent de Paul Society
soup kitchen last Saturday. Ryan arrived after the crowds had
left, but washed some dishes that had been (specifically)
left behind for him to wash.

[Juanita Sherba, St. Vincent's Saturday coordinator for the dining
hall, says] The event "was a photo op," she said. "It was the phoniest
piece of baloney I've ever been associated with. In hindsight, I would
have never let him in the door."

A new commercial
from the Obama campaign targeting Ohio slams Mitt
Romney for not having supported the auto bailout and declared the
Republican Presidential nominee as "not one of us," as the president
looks to shore up support in the crucial battleground state.

Find the Missing Concept

So I finally got around to reading the
Atlantic article "The Weaker Sex"
by Sandra Tsing Loh
on which James Taranto mused last month
(last item, "Plenty of Fish in the Atlantic").

The article is purportedly a book review, but is mostly a
long discussion of how Sandra and her female friends view their modern
heterosexual relationships, as experienced by successful professional
urban women attending an L.A. dinner party. With a focus on those
cases where the woman is bringing more money into the household
than is the man, something Sandra (probably correctly) contends
is likely to become more common in the future.

Clue: all attendees are divorced
save for Annette, who seems to be headed in that direction.
Even non-marital relationships, like Sandra's current one,
can be rocky:

My own culinary moment of truth came on a recent day of
frustrating business calls and frustrating writing, plus an
hour-long installation of a complex new HP all-in-one printer
thingy while roasting a chicken while struggling to fix our
enigmatic dishwasher, after which I sat down to dinner with my
male partner—who had just cheerfully returned from the
outside world—with one candle (I couldn’t find the
other). I made the mistake of asking “How was your day?”
and he made the mistake of responding, and as I watched his
mouth move, I felt my trigger finger twitch and thought those
awful words only a woman who needs a man neither to support her
nor to be a father to her children can think: How long until
I vote you off the island?

Taranto has his own description of Sandra's piece, which I suggest
you read. He notes that the Atlantic runs a lot
of articles that might be
fairly classified as a "disquisition on distaff difficulties".
His comment on the genre:

Perhaps these Atlantic pieces are assigned and written with only women
in mind, and this columnist is the only heterosexual man who finds them
interesting enough to read all the way through. Another possibility is
that the magazine's actual editorial mission is to disabuse bachelors of
any notion that it might be nice to be married.

So (as I said) I read Sandra's article. That makes at two
heterosexuals, Mr. Taranto! Although I think my motivation is mostly I paid
for the magazine, so I'm gonna read the darn thing.

I count somewhere north of 4200 words. But I got to the end, and noticed
something. Or, specifically, the lack of something.
In an article of that length
entirely about intimate man-woman relationships, how
many times would you expect to find the word "love"?

Thanks to Firefox's "Find"
function, the answer, with emphasis added in each case:

A quote from Mendelson's book: "Coming home is your major restorative in
life. These are formidably good things, which you cannot get merely by
finding true love or getting married or having children or landing the
best job in the world—or even by moving into the house of your
dreams."

And, finally, in the second-to-last paragraph:

Much more precarious is the road I’ve pursued with my Mr. Y
[Sandra's term for an
abstract sensitive, empathetic "feelings guy"]. If Mr.
Y is what women (now economically dominant but still wanting
companionship and love) are seeking, we’d better brush up on our
Quicken and buckle up our tool belts. The non–Martha Stewart Living
trade-off (and doesn’t it seem perfectly apt that Martha lacks a
male partner?): as for the warm body in bed, men (at least some) are
nicer to talk to than dogs, and if their domestic skills stink—well,
many of ours are worse.

So: four occurrences, only two of them Sandra's own words.
And only the last
might conceivably be referring to
romantic love. But it's not unlikely to be (as Harlan Ellison put it)
a misspelling of "sex".

URLs du Jour

2012-10-16

I hope President Obama loses the election in (gulp!) three weeks.
But every so often I'm reminded that I can't get equally
hopeful about Mitt Romney winning. Here's Phil Greenspun
with some common sense about the defense budget.

One of Mitt Romney’s big ideas is a dramatic increase in funding for
the U.S. military. As a taxpayer this reminds me of watching $1 billion
Navy ships confronting a few Somalis in a rubber boat with an outboard
motor and wondering “How could we possibly afford to sort through
these guys one at a time?”

I like our military just fine, but pretending they're a lean
organization doesn't pass the giggle test.

Senator Tom Coburn, M.D., has brought out Wastebook
2012, a compendium of this year's Federal government profligacy.

For Granite Staters, our local pork is being consumed by
Smuttynose Brewery:

A New Hampshire brewery, Smuttynose, will use $750,970 in federal funds
to construct a
new brewery and restaurant on farmland outside of Portsmouth.The
taxpayer
money will help the brewery purchase three brew tanks and install sewer
connections to
its 42,000-square-foot facility.

References available via the link. I like beer as much as the next
guy… OK, I might like beer much more than the next guy,
but Smuttynose should pay its own way.

How are children supposed to learn to act like adults, when so much of
what they see on television portrays adults acting like children?

Sowell also quotes a claim by Edward Lazear: “there hasn’t been
one day during the entire Obama presidency when as many Americans were
working as on the day President Bush left office.”. An
inconvenient truth!

"Responsibility" is much-discussed today, since Hillary has taken "full
responsiblity" for the botched security decisions leading to the
murder of diplomatic personnel in Libya last month.

“I believe we need a
president who believed what Harry Truman believed. That buck stopped in
the Oval Office.”

… that was then, this is now.

And (last but not least) the indispensable Geraghty
notes that "I take responsibility" has been an "endless empty refrain"
in the Obama Administration (with plenty of examples, if you have the
stomach for them). It's a cheap way to make yourself
sound like an adult, without it actually meaning anything.

URLs du Jour

An insightful blog post from the wish-I-was-as-cool-as Nick
Gillespie; Nick analyzes, and mostly debunks a Politico
article discussing how big-L Libertarian candidates
could act as "spoilers" to GOP prospects. Sample:

Let it be noted that no third-party candidate anywhere ever cost
a major-party candidate an election. Have third-party candidates
gotten vote totals that more than cover the spread between the Dem
and the Rep? Of course.

But major-party candidates lose elections all on their own. If
they cannot close the deal with voters - even with all the
institutional advantages they possess - well, that's their problem.
Don't blame others for your own failure to woo voters.

Indeed, the whole spoiler thing tends to falls apart when you
look more closely. To wit, here's part of the discussion about the
Senate race in the Show-Me State, where a lackluster and thoroughly
undistinguished incumbent is facing a challenger whose basic grasp
of biology suggests he'd be a first-question washout on Are You
Smarter than a 5th Grader?:

… and I suggest you Read The Whole Thing™. (Maybe
if I bought a leather jacket, I'd be as cool as Nick? Nah, guess not.)

If you haven't already done so,
you gotta go to the Google today
and check out their homage to Winsor McCay, creator of Little
Nemo. (If you miss it today, you might be able to dig it
out of Google's doodle
archive, which I recommend.)

You might have heard about Argo, Ben Affleck's new movie. It's
supposed to be pretty good, and it's based on the real-life
story of the rescue of American embassy personnel from Iran
in 1980. The gimmick (revealed in the trailers) is that the
CIA's cover story to get into Iran is that they're making a sci-fi movie
titled Argo.

Well: it turns out that the fake movie Argo, was based
on Zelazny's Hugo-winning novel Lord of Light.

But (of course) they didn't make a movie based on Lord of
Light, either in 1980 or today. But there's a website devoted
to it, including some old artwork by the great comic book artist
Jack Kirby. Kirby's drawings were borrowed (the website says "stolen")
by the CIA to nail down the cover story.
Fascinating.

If Argo does well, maybe Affleck could get Lord of Light
made? Seems only fair.

That's not a bad batting average, but for a "Top 10 Greatest" list, it's
surprisingly awful.

There's something about a project of this sort that compels me to
finish it, so up comes The Disappeared by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.
(io9 actually recommends the whole series, and this is the chronological
first
in the series.)
Another loser, I'm afraid. But at least the Kindle version was
relatively inexpensive.

It is set mostly on the Moon, in a time when interactions between
humans and intelligent species are common enough
to set up legal rules for conflict resolution. And the rules
make Draco look like an ACLU card-carrier:
if you run afoul of an alien legal system, they get to do pretty
much whatever they want to you and your family. Tough darts, kid.

Unsurprisingly, there is a thriving market in
"disappearance" services,
which promise to extract you from your current
life, and set you up tracelessly as someone else, somewhere else,
all in order to escape
alien legal punishment.

The story here involves two lunar cops dealing with some thorny
cases where disappearance has been unsuccessful:
one race has kidnapped a couple kids to atone for
the sins of the parents;
another has slaughtered the passengers of a ship, who thought they
were being taken to safety; a third is looking to track down
a lady lawyer they hold responsible for the subsequent crimes
of a client she defended. It takes a Real Long Time for the cops to
figure things out: the disappearance service common to all three
cases has decided to make a little
more money by betraying their clients to the aliens.

Ms. Rusch is an amazingly prolific
professional writer, and won some awards, so you might
have better luck with her than I did. Her prose was (mostly)
professional, but lacked sparkle and failed to grab my interest. As the
book wore on, I got the feeling she was padding things to meet some
contractually-obligated word count. One chapter opens with a character
waking up to find his right foot asleep. But—ah—a few
sentences later, we discover "Only one side had fallen asleep. The other
side was just fine."

Good to know. The few fractions of a second I spent parsing that
are now gone, never to return.

There are also signs of shoddy editing. One guy says "I was never really
comfortable with the way we were flaunting the law." Another reflects
that he'd heard some bit of advice "from every single officer he'd
spoken too." If my unprofessional eye can catch such boners, there are
almost certainly others.
Fair or not, I hear the publisher saying:
Proofreading? Nah! Just get it out the door so the boobs can buy it.

When President Barack Obama and others on the
left are not busy admonishing the rest of us to be "civil" in our
discussions of political issues, they are busy letting loose insults,
accusations, and smears against those who dare to disagree with
them.

Like so many people who have been beaten in a verbal encounter, and
who can think of clever things to say the next day after it is all over,
President Obama, after his clear loss in his debate with Mitt Romney,
called Governor Romney a "phony."

Professor Sowell goes on to detail some embarrassing history of Obama's
2007 rabble-rousing speech at Hampton University, and how it contrasted
with his actual voting record.

Jay Nordlinger's Impromptus column this week aimed
most of the phony fire at Obama. Unsurprising, but he recollects
the lapel-flag controversy from the last election.

Obama is a little funny with his lapel pin -- the American flag. Once,
it was on. Then Obama took it off. He said he didn't want any of that
phony patriotism. He wouldn't wear his patriotism on his sleeve, or his
lapel. Others who did so were phony-baloneys. Then he put the flag pin
back on. It can be so confusing, keeping track of Obama's moods and
principles.

First he's for gay marriage. Then he's not. "The union of a man and a
woman, only." Then he's back on again.

Anyway, my question: If Obama loses the election this year, will he
ever wear an American-flag pin again? Or will he be free of it? Is the
pin just "boob bait for Bubbas," to use a once-famous phrase of Senator
Moynihan?

My bet is: he won't wear the flag pin whether he wins or loses.
Because, as he noted
to the Russian president back in March: "After my
election, I have more flexibility."

Via Matt
Welch at Reason, we also have a Jack Shafer column as
a must-read: "Why
we vote for liars". It's very much a plague-on-all-your-houses
column, noting truth behind the no-longer-funny joke "How can you tell
when a politician is lying? His lips move."

Shafer's a little too tough on Romney, not tough enough on Obama.
But his main point is on target and
relates to a different saying, the one about
when you point your finger, there are three pointing back at you:

The pervasiveness of campaign lies tells us something we'd rather not
acknowledge, at least not publicly: On many issues, voters prefer lies
to the truth. That's because the truth about the economy, the future of
Social Security and Medicare, immigration, the war in Afghanistan,
taxes, the budget, the deficit, and the national debt is too dismal to
contemplate. As long as voters cast their votes for candidates who make
them feel better, candidates will continue to lie. And to win.

The Five-Year Engagement

Here's what I want to know:
has there ever been an actor as lucky as Jason Segel?
Although I'm probably not qualified to say, he doesn't strike
me as a chick magnet. George Clooney he ain't. And yet, his
career has found him canoodling with Alyson Hannigan, Amy Adams,
Kristen Bell, Mila Kunis,… and here, Emily Blunt.

I know, it's just acting. But still. If Jason Segal doesn't wake
up in the morning with tears of gratitude running down his
face as he reflects on his good fortune,
I swear I will hunt him down and
kick his ass until he does.

Anyway: here, Jason—I call him Jason—plays Tom, a gifted and
aspiring chef in San Francisco. He's been going out with Violet
(Ms. Blunt) for a year, and (in an impressively romantic setup
that he manages to endearingly botch) he pops the question. Of course,
Violet's answer is yes.

But you did notice the movie's title, right? Violet is
hoping for a post-doc at Berkeley in her field of experimental
psychology. That doesn't work out, but she gets one almost as
good at Michigan. So Tom and Violet postpone the nuptials,
and head off to Ann Arbor. Violet blossoms, but Tom has to settle
for deli work (albeit upscale deli work). Tom's frustration
and resentment continue to grow, reflected in Violet's
nagging guilt and dissatisfaction.
The not-unpredictable happens.

This movie is from the Judd Apatow factory, and bears
most of his trademarks: a supporting cast that's
hilariously raunchy, some darker serious notes about
infidelity and mortality, and an overall old-fashioned
moral theme about love and commitment.
It's over two hours long, and feels it in parts, but overall
enjoyable. And the ending is sweet enough to make your
teeth hurt.

Headhunters

Stieg Larsson's posthumous success with the Girl series
has opened up the field for Scandinavian crime thrillers.
This Norwegian movie is based on a
novel by Jo Nesbø and it's pretty
good.

Roger Brown makes a decent living as a corporate headhunter. But
he's insecure—really—about his height and maintaining
his beautiful, much taller wife in an expensive lifestyle. So,
with the help of a confederate placed in a security service,
he's turned to a side career as an art thief.

A risky choice! And Roger finds that even the occasional
Munch lithograph theft can't keep up with his budget for
spousal maintenance. But he hears that a recent hiring prospect
has possession of a long-lost Rubens original work. That could
be the big score that would set him up for life!
But, as it turns out, it just sinks him rapidly into
a horrific tale of murder, betrayal, and totally implausible
technology. The pale Norwegian
body count keeps going up.

Rated R for
"bloody violence including some grisly images, strong sexual content
and [mostly pale Norwegian] nudity." The MPAA
rating doesn't mention a particularly disgusting (albeit non-gory)
scene that had both
Mrs. Salad and I averting our sensitive eyes.
But it's fun and well-crafted, with unexpected plot twists and some bits
of very dark comedy.

Cynde Sears Responds to Pun Salad

Unlike other responses within the blogosphere to my letter to the
Washington Post, I found yours a bit charming and silly, not mean or
vindictive. But I would like to correct one detail. I would not likely
be
sipping lemonade while folks earned a living working in my garden -
don't
care for it, to be honest. No, I would likely be drinking a fine Spanish
cava, as I did while enjoying roast suckling pig in one of the finest
restaurants in Segovia, Spain, as I did just this afternoon while on
holiday. Or perhaps sipping a dram of the world's finest Scotch, as I
did
while on holiday in Edinburgh this spring.

Brief comment here: I think Mitt, whose behavior
was under discussion, is more of a lemonade kind of guy.
(Although he might make it with Perrier.)

You see, even as a liberal, I
can make money, open a business, have significant savings and a good
retirement, send my child to the college of his choice, take European
vacations at least once a year -- and still feel that when given a
choice
between being cheap and giving people meaningful work that pays well, I
will always choose to share my good fortune. If Romney will not support
three or four workers with his hundreds of millions, why would any
reasonable person conclude he would spend what it takes -- from either
the
public or private sectors -- to put millions to work? His penury and
personal greed reflect exactly what's happening in this country. Major
corporations are acting like Romney: putting more money in the bank
while
depriving people of work, thereby contributing to our national economic
malaise. They sit on record profits and won't hire. Like Romney, they
are
cheap. And I don't care for cheap people.

While my original post took Cynde Sears to task for "irritating
judgmentalism", her response caused me to regret that a little.
Although my mostly-libertarian politics should imply a live-and-let-live
attitude,
I can be kind of judgmental myself.

[OK, stop laughing.]

And when you're judgmental about the judgmentalism of others, the whole
enterprise turns into a sort of Ouroborosian dining on one's own
tail, and I have no idea what sort of wine would go well with that.

So, although I'm a lousy Christian, I reread Matthew
7:1-5 and will try to take that to heart, for at least the
next few minutes.

I still think her criticism of others' behavior is economically
misguided. Like many who claim the "liberal" label these days,
Cynde Sears looks at the economic decisions of
other people—from "major corporations"
down to individuals like Mitt Romney—and thinks: I could do a
better job than that.

Even occasional readers know where I sit on that topic: scale up
that attitude, add political power, and you find yourself
in the Choomwagon riding down
the
Road to Serfdom.
Again, see David
Boaz for more specificity.

But the "cheap people" comment caused me to recall an even more
appropriate response: this
classic Slate article from Steve Landsburg, who mused
on the economics of Ebenezer Scrooge-like behavior, the kind that
Cynde Sears finds so distasteful. Brief excerpt:

Scrooge has been called ungenerous. I say that's a bum rap. What
could be more generous than keeping your lamps unlit and your plate
unfilled, leaving more fuel for others to burn and more food for others
to eat? Who is a more benevolent neighbor than the man who employs no
servants, freeing them to wait on someone else?

[…]

In this whole world, there is nobody more generous than the
miser--the man who could deplete the world's resources but
chooses not to. The only difference between miserliness and philanthropy
is that the philanthropist serves a favored few while the miser
spreads his largess far and wide.

If you build a house and refuse to buy a house, the rest of the world
is one house richer. If you earn a dollar and refuse to spend a dollar,
the rest of the world is one dollar richer--because you produced a
dollar's worth of goods and didn't consume them.

Christmas is coming, so I suggest you Read The Whole Thing™. God
bless Us, Every One!

Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift

Paul Rahe is a professor at Hillsdale College and an occasional
pundit on current events in the dextrosphere (most recently
at Ricochet).
This 2009 book
has been highly recommended by the good folks
at Power
Line. It was available at the library of the University Near Here,
so I checked it out.

The book's subtitle is "Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the
Modern Prospect". Rahe's project here is a deep examination of
the thoughts of these three French political philosopher/historians
and show how they illuminate today's slow march of modern Western
democracies into a gray, comfy despotism.

Large sections of the book are devoted to each thinker in turn.
It's (frankly) tough going for the casual reader, more so with
Montesquieu and Rousseau than with Tocqueville. Rahe's
prose doesn't help, as his explications are broken up with
many "short quotes from the authors' works", sometimes
only one "or two" words "long." In addition, some words and phrases
are annotated with the actual French used by the author [auteur].
And there are occasional coded pointers back to the original works
(TBpptht, II.iv.3. pp.243-44,11,1) which might be useful to someone
who wants to check out the reference, but otherwise not.

So large stretches seem of the book
seem to be written in order to satisfy
a particularly pedantic thesis committee; I think many general
readers
would find this a twisty slog full of potholes.
(I have to admit I'm one of them.)
But things even out in the last stretch of the book, that contains
Rahe's comments on America's "drift" over the last century from a
limited
constitutional, commercial, republic into a
administrative state whose central control continues to seep
into more and more of its citizens' daily lives. Rahe provides
a sweeping conservative critique of this, showing how (in particular)
Tocqueville was prescient in detecting some of these trends in
the early 19th century. (And others not so much.)

I found an interesting tidbit, given President Obama's recent
slagging of GOP budget proposals as
"thinly-veiled social Darwinism." That was claptrap, of course, but
check out this quote:

[G]overnment is not a machine, but a living thing. It
falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of
organic life. It is
accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment,
necessitated by
its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life. No
living thing can have its
organs offset against each other as checks, and live. On the contrary,
its life is dependent
upon their quick cooperation, their ready response to the commands of
instinct or
intelligence, their amicable community of purpose. Government is not a
body of blind
forces; it is a body of men, with highly differentiated functions, no
doubt, in our modern
day of specialization, but with a common task and purpose. Their
cooperation is
indispensable, their war-fare fatal. There can be no successful
government without
leadership or without the intimate, almost instinctive, coordination of
the organs of life
and action. This is not theory, but fact, and displays its force as
fact, whatever theories
may be thrown across its track. Living political constitutions must be
Darwinian in
structure and in practice.

Emphasis added.
The writer goes on to dismiss the Constitution as written as hopelessly
"Newtonian".

Now that's real (and unveiled)
Social Darwinism. The promulgator of this odiousness statism?
Why, none other than that "progressive" darling, Woodrow
Wilson.

URLs du Jour

2012-10-09

Your R-rated article for the day is at McSweeney's: "Craig’s
Artisanal
Pickles Philosophy", as set forth by Craig, of Craig's Artisanal
Pickles. As it turns out, Craig is kind of … well, judge
for yourself (via an excerpt relatively PG):

[O]ur philosophy gives us a tremendous advantage over our artisanal
competitors, shackled as they are by obsolete notions of “Right”
and “Wrong.” We donate nothing to charity, instead reinvesting
all profits into our intimidatingly massive stockpile of shotguns. We
have no qualms about genetically modified organisms, so our flocks of
Craig’s Pre-Brined Turkeys are a huge hit at Thanksgiving. And all
of our products contain a lot of nicotine.

If you go there,
you have my permission to ignore the "reasons to re-elect Obama"
link that McSweeney's is putting at the top of pages these days.
Unless, like Mike
Riggs at Reason, you want to make fun of the whole
sometimes-cultish, sometimes high-schoolish enterprise. Here
he tees off on Reggie Watts, who actually typed, referring to
Obama: "He has the power of three eagles."

Critics of Team Blue have compared Democratic support for Obama,
particularly in the face of his authoritarianism, to support for a
cult leader. But belonging to a cult means studying your leader's
teachings and practicing effective proselytization. Watts, and the
other celebrities who have written for 90 Days, 90 Reasons, do
neither. With the exception of "free" health care, they can't seem
to name (much less explain) anything Obama has done, or anything he
plans to do. Hell, they don't even quote him. Instead, they
describe how he looks and what his hobbies are,
and how awesome it is that he has time to pay attention to
them. Obama is a popular kid, and people like Watts are voting
for him as if he were running for student body president.

Four weeks to go, and I'm sure things will only get sillier, nastier,
and crazier from here on out.

Jay
Bhattacharya takes down the LA Times "fact checker" who
denies that Obamacarea's Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) will
have no effect on patient care.

The media "fact check" business is incredibly tiresome given how
pedantic and downright inaccurate it is, but I wanted to weigh in on
this one before it hardens. The LA Times somehow thinks that the ACA (aka Obamacare)
will have no effect on determining what care patients can get, and
consequently dings Romney for saying it will. There isn't a single
honest health economist out there who agrees with the LA Times on this
one.

My lovely and talented sister, who lives in Iowa, reports the
odd combination of amusement and outrage there that (believe it or
not) doesn't have anything to do with politics: Arby's brought
out a TV ad with an ex-NYC detective narrator reporting the
devastating, nasty truth about competitor Subway: their sandwich meat
is sliced in … gasp! … Iowa .

Which, the commercial implies, might as well be an Upton Sinclair
slaughterhouse based in Mordor.

The outcry forced Arby's to abjectly apologize to Iowans,
and alter the wording of their commercial.

The 2012 winners of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest
have been announced. As usual, they are hilariously awful. My fave:

“I’ll never get over him,” she said to herself and the truth
of that statement settled into her brain the way glitter settles on to a
plastic landscape in a Christmas snow globe when she accepted the fact
that she was trapped in bed between her half-ton boyfriend and the wall
when he rolled over on to her nightgown and passed out, leaving her no
way to climb out.

I've been meaning to write on a peeve of mine: Comcast envelopes
in the mail proclaiming "IMPORTANT INFORMATION ENCLOSED".

And it is invariably not IMPORTANT. Instead, Comcast wants
to sell me something new.

Gosh, you think anyone else might be irked? Thanks to
Google, I can tell you the answer is:
yes,
yes,
yes,
yes,
…

Terminator Salvation

"Terminator Salivation? That's disgusting!
Those killer androids are menacing enough, you want to make them drool,
too? Didn't we get enough of that in the Alien movies?

"Wait, what?

"Oh, that's quite different! Never mind."

</voice>

A small prequel sets up the plot driver: Marcus (played by
Sam Worthington) is about to be executed by the judicial system.
Thanks to Helena Bonham Carter's badgering, he donates his
body to "science"; although it turns out the scientists
work for Cyberdyne, who, as we know, go on to invent
technology that ends the world.

The next thing Marcus knows, he's in the future,
and Skynet has blown up most of humanity. I hate it when that happens.

John Connor (Christian Bale) is a major fighter in the resistance, of course, but
he's not the leader. That's General Ashdown, played by well-known
hardass Michael Ironside.
And John has not yet encountered Kyle
Reese (Anton Yelchin), but thanks to his mom's posthumous instructions, he knows
that he pretty much has to. (Since we've seen the previous movies,
we know this too.)

If you don't understand anything I just said: there's absolutely no
reason
you should see this movie.

And (generally) we also know what has to happen:
Connor and Reese have to meet up; Marcus has to help out; Ashdown's
pig-headed stubbornness will nearly doom the good guys;
some major character is not gonna make it to the end of the
movie, and there's only one candidate for that.

I wanted to like this, but… sorry. Christian Bale is
a fine, intense, actor, but his talent is expended
to no purpose here. There are lots of
explosions, chases, and other PG-13 mayhem, all with decent special
effects,
but not much very interesting.
Perhaps realizing that there's not a lot of reason to care
what happens to the adults in this movie, the makers threw a cute
(and mute) kid into the perilous mix. Shameless.

There's a scene near the end
where we see a scowling old friend from the first movie, but
that just reminded me that I liked that one a lot better.

But, Beelzebub help me, I'm actually starting to like Mitt Romney.
The latest nudge in that direction comes from this
WaPo letter to the editor from Ms. Cynde Sears of Oak Hill,
Virginia. Cynde wrote in reaction to a WaPo article, which
described an occasion of sinful behavior:

Mitt Romney asked a contractor (perhaps a small business) for an
estimate to construct a walkway. When he learned what it would cost, he
decided to build it himself with his sons' help. In this one action, Mr.
Romney unwittingly displayed who he really is.

And, according to Cynde, who Mitt "really is", is a horrible,
horrible person. Cynde goes on to detail what the morally
superior person
(herself, specifically) might do
to handle a comparable home improvement:
go ahead and hire contractors. (And perhaps watch them toil under a
blazing sun,
while sipping lemonade on the veranda.)
But with his do-it-himselfishness, Cynde says,
Mitt was "cheating people out of jobs."

The link is from David
Boaz from Cato@Liberty, who (correctly) chastises
Cynde for her woeful economic ignorance. But I what I took
away from the letter was her even more irritating judgmentalism.

It used to be that moralizers, pecksniffs, and bluenoses were
a right-wing phenomenon; at least that was the stereotype.
Cynde reminds us that this unctuous tide has shifted
leftward.

And, as another data point, this
column from Andrew C. McCarthy has the aside:

Whatever you may think of the former Massachusetts governor's
politics, there should never have been any hesitation about Romney
the man. This is a bright, self-made man, one whose public and
private philanthropy, which puts most of us to shame, should be
legendary. It is not. That's because his good works weren't done to
burnish his political credentials and his decency discourages their
exploitation toward that end. You don't have to agree with Romney on
everything to see that he is a mensch. He obviously loves the
America that is -- the land of opportunity that has rewarded
his work ethic. Like most of us, he wants that America preserved, not
"fundamentally transformed."

Um, good point. I've said a lot of mean stuff about Mitt over the
past few years. If Mitt wins, I'll probably continue. But Andy's right:
as a person, Mitt puts me to shame.

Which made me think: if we did elect presidents on "character
issues", is there any doubt that Bill Clinton would never have made
it out of Arkansas? How about JFK? LBJ? Nixon?

And now, back to our regularly scheduled program, already in progress:
At Investors Business Daily, John Merline details
"Obama's
Re-Election Case Rests On 5 Phony Claims." Which is no news to anyone
who's been paying attention, but comes with a nice chart, which I, erm,
borrowed:

"When I got on the stage, I met this very spirited fellow who claimed to
be Mitt Romney," Obama told Denver supporters. "The real Romney has been
running around the country for the last year promising $5 trillion in
tax cuts that favor the wealthy."

Only problem: Romney hasn't been running around the
country promising that. The $5T number was made up by pro-Obama sources.
Romney's actual proposals are discussed here.
(Warning: you need to have a longer attention span than President
Obama has to get through it.)

At Reason, Brian Doherty opines: "Libertarian
Gary Johnson Should Win the Election". In the sense (I think) that
"winning" means: take enough votes away from one candidate or the other
in key states in order to swing the election to the other guy.

But as far as phoniness goes:

Money is so important that Johnson's campaign did something
liable to piss off many hardcore libertarians who don't
believe in publicly financed elections. He sued
the FEC, trying to get $750,000 out of them before the election
that he claims he is legally entitled to and has not received, as
the Miami Herald reported last week.

Note that Doherty, bless his libertarian heart, fails to avoid the
statist euphemism when he says that Johnson is trying to get $750K
out of the Federal Election Commission. A truer libertarian would note
that
Johnson is trying to get $750K from taxpayers,
merely using the FEC as a temporary piggy bank.

Non-presidential phoniness:
New Hampshire is a "swing state", so the Pun Salad household is under
steady assault by presidential-race TV commercials. Thank goodness for
TiVo and Netflix!

As a "bonus", we also get ads out of Boston TV stations for the
Senate race between Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren. In the
Weekly Standard, Michael Warren looks at that race
with the irresistible headline: "The
Natural Versus the Phony". You already know which is which. But
here's an amusing bit from a Warren rally, where Mike Monahan,
a union official, delivers a speech riffing off the Carhartt jacket
Scott Brown wears while driving his pick-up truck in his ads:

"Pick-up truck? Carhartt?" Monahan says, pronouncing it
Cah-haht. "Don't let him insult your intelligence. Where's the
cutting oil stains on that Carhartt? Where's the chalk stains on that
Carhartt? Where's the rip from the rebar tie wire? There's none, because
that jacket or truck has never seen a day's work."

Geez, maybe Brown could help Mitt Romney with some home improvements
or something.

Vengeance

This movie was directed by Johnnie To, who (news to me) is a
famous moviemaker in Hong Kong. For a crime thriller, it's quite
arty. The primary protagonist is played by
Johnny Hallyday, who's a famous French actor (also news to me).

Right from the get-go, an entire Hong Kong family, husband, wife and kids,
is shot up by a team of hit men. (The kids too? Yes. Although
that's mercifully not explicit.)

Unfortunately for the bad guys,
the wife was the daughter of Costello, a French chef with a restaurant
on the Champs-Élysées, but with a darker
history. And he sets out on a crusade for… well, you see the
title up there.

His method relies on hyper-Dickensian coincidence: he just
happens upon
a different team of hit men who are in the process of
taking out the unfaithful mistress of a local mob boss and her lover
(in flagrante delicto if you know what I mean). He hires them
for their skills and local connections. What follows is (of course)
a lot of shooting. But there is also a major ironic plot twist
based in Costello's violent past. There's a reason he keeps taking
pictures of people: he needs to.

I said it was arty: there are a lot of imaginative eye-catching visuals
layered over the (admittedly pretty standard) plot. And there's an
undertheme of loyalty; I couldn't help but think that this
is a movie the late Robert B. Parker would have loved.

I May Never Get Off the Couch Again

Awhile back, our cable provider, Comcast,
"went digital" on us, requiring us to get
a Motorola digital decoder box; only some broadcast channels remained
on their analog feed.

But a few weeks back, Comcast yanked the analog feed, replacing it
with an ugly text screen saying, in effect, "you shouldn't be
seeing this." Sigh. Fine. Welcome to the future.

Why this mattered: we had a TiVo Series 2 DT DVR. It had two tuners,
and we could feed one from the Motorola box, the other direct
from the cable. It took a little bit of pre-planning and care, but we
were able to reliably record two shows at once (or watch one and record
one) as long as one was on the analog feed. It was a little kludgy,
involving an IR "blaster" cable strung between boxes
which allowed the TiVo to change the Motorola's channel. But it
was OK.

However, going to all-digital changed all that: no longer could we watch
one show and record another. And we couldn't record two shows
at the same time. Argh. Back to the dark ages? Never!

Fortunately, TiVo had a solution: The Premiere 4. Which
has (woo!) four tuners.

This took a bit of bravery. Because the Premiere 4 requires a
plug-in multi-stream CableCARD™ to do its magic, and you
need to get it from Comcast. It is not encouraging when a simple Google
search takes you to this
page, a thread entitled "Multi Stream Card & HD Tivo Nightmare",
dedicated to headaches experienced by some folks trying to put this
all together.

But I'm here to tell you that it all worked:

I ordered the Premiere 4 direct from TiVo; you don't have to
do that, but if you do, it comes pre-authorized. (Otherwise
authorization is a separate step.) You get a UPS tracking number
when it ships.

On the arrival date,
the local Comcast service center gave me the required multi-stream
card with no hassle: I just needed to show them my
latest bill.

Once everything was at home,
the hardest part of installation was the
de-installation: navigating the tangle of cables and
cords to
yank the old TiVo and the Motorola box.

But then, just followed the clear directions:
(a) hooked the cable up to the Tivo; (b) hooked the TiVo to
the TV; (c) plugged the 802.11g adapter from my old TiVo into the
new one; (e) plugged in the power, and turned on the TV. "Welcome to TiVo"
came up. Yay!

The onscreen guided setup is also straightforward, although the
initialization procedure involves some internet downloading
at wireless-G speeds, so takes awhile. I was prompted to insert
the
CableCARD™, and it was detected straight away.

Later, I copied the old system's "Season Passes" to the new one; this
happens via TiVo's website. It took a few hours to become effective.
Minor gripe: the priority settings were lost along the way, but
with (again, woo!) four tuners, that shouldn't matter a bit.

The only bump in the
road came when it was necessary to call Comcast to "pair" the
CableCARD™. The nice lady at the other end had a thick accent, and
I had to keep asking her to repeat.
After she did the pairing
procedure, we were slightly concerned that I was not getting TV at that
point; as it turned out, she thought I was at a different stage
of the setup process than I actually was. She assured me that if
I just muddled through, all would be well. And it was.

So it's a total win: one fewer box, one fewer remote,
a lot fewer wires. The new
box has some new fancy features the old one did not.
The Comcast "On Demand" material is accessible via the TiVo interface.

And wow, four tuners. But will there ever be four things I want
to watch on at the same time? We'll see.

URLs du Jour

2012-10-03

An eggshellent Reason article titled
"Your
Vote Doesn't Count"
by Katherine Mangu-Ward
is now online, and it gets the coveted Pun Salad
Read The Whole Thing™ award for the day. Ms. Mangu-Ward
is witty and perceptive. Sample:

Voting is widely thought to be one of the most important things a person
can do. But the reasons people give for why they vote (and why everyone
else should too) are flawed, unconvincing, and sometimes even dangerous.
The case for voting relies on factual errors, misunderstandings about
the duties of citizenship, and overinflated perceptions of self-worth.
There are some good reasons for some people to vote some of the time.
But there are a lot more bad reasons to vote, and the bad ones are more
popular.

See if you don't agree.

OK, so you might vote, or not. Gonna watch the debates?
There's one on tonight!
Not me, bubba. David Bier notes "How
Debates Make Us Dumber". Brief and convincing. For example:

In tonight’s debate, you will not learn of the great issues of the
day. Those, I can assure you, will not be addressed, and even if they
were, the shallow slogan with which they would be dismissed will only
grant the illusion that they are not so great a problem after all. Nor
will you even learn anything about the candidates or how they will
“rule us.” You will just discover the better entertainer, the
greater fraud, and perhaps even the next fancy of the democratic mob.

But if you decide to watch the debate, here's a drinking
game. For example:

We don’t get to choose this year between “good” and
“better’” — have we ever enjoyed that choice? But we do
get a sharp distinction this year between “bad” and
“worse.”

I’m going with “bad” because I’m not sure we’ll
survive another term of the worst.

Doug Mataconis says: there's no case for a libertarian to vote for
Mitt.

I’m not going to tell other libertarians how they should vote.
Some have made the decision that defeating President Obama is their top
priority and I can understand that. Others, like me, are sick of
choosing between the lesser of two evils and seeing the person you voted
for leading the nation further down the road to calamity. Some, like Kevin Boyd,
are suggesting that not voting for President at all is the way to go.
You can all choose for yourselves. For me, though, I have yet to hear a
persuasive case for any libertarian to support Mitt Romney, which is why
I will be voting for Gary Johnson.

Worst of all, in my mind: a Romney victory would spell the end of the
Tea Party movement. The Republican Party would then be able to
discipline libertarian-leaning Republicans to support the Administration
in just the same way that they’re trying to yoke libertarians to
support the ticket. Free-market libertarians could have said no when
George W. supported expanding Medicare. They could have said no when
George W. proposed bailouts. Now, once again, they have a chance to say
no. And they better do it while they still can—and insist that the
2016 nomination go to someone who actually believes in limited
government and individual freedom.

One can point to individual unhappy results from Republican-appointed
justices, but it is a mathematical certainty that Obama-appointed
justices will flip the Court on […] critical issues of the rights of
individuals against the government—none more critical than First
Amendment protection for political speech. Once that falls, the game is
over and libertarians have lost permanently. This alone is a dispositive
libertarian case for Romney, even before one gets to the difference
between a Romney and Obama on economic freedom and regulation.

Like Mataconis, I'm enough of a libertarian to not tell you how
you should vote. But I think all these guys should be read in the
light of the Mangu-Ward article cited first today. Clarify your reason
for voting, then decide what makes sense in light of that.

URLs du Jour

2012-10-02

Hugh
Hewitt prepares you for the debate by listing a number
of President Obama's "poker tells" that should inform the
attentive listener that the verbiage in progress will be deficient
in truth-content. For example:

… watch for the parade of straw men, the president's favorite rhetorical
trick. He will set up arguments that have never been made in the service
of Republican goals that have never existed, and then he will denounce
both. If the appearance of a straw man serves as a trigger in a drinking
game, many bottles will empty by the end of Debate No. 1.

Pun Salad has, in the past, done something similar with
"Barackrobatics", reliable signals that the President was
about to utter something reality-challenged.
A small sample, with links to past articles:

It can be a false
choice between two bad things, as in: "We need not choose
between a chaotic and unforgiving capitalism and an oppressive
government-run economy. That is a false choice that will not serve our
people or any people."

Or it can be a false choice between two good things, as in "As
for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety
and our ideals."

Either way, Obama will claim to have a scheme to avoid making such "false"
choices.

The President has a habit of leaving out inconvenient words that might
irk some of his supporters.
As in "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are
created equal, endowed with certain inalienable rights: life and liberty
and the pursuit of happiness."

Michigan State University said it will offer counseling for students
after a professor in the Engineering Building began shouting in a
hallway, and, according to some social media reports, removed his
clothing.

This Wednesday, Oct. 3, the UNH campus will be visited by former
president Bill Clinton as part of his campaign tour stumping for
President Barack Obama.

The grassroots event, […]

I stopped reading right there, as the article at first seemed to be written
in English, but instead was in an unfamiliar language where "grassroots" has
a totally different meaning.

Pet peeve: having to click, click, click in order to read an entire story
at a website. It's a peeve for me, but for Farhad Manjoo
it's a crusade:

Pagination is one of the worst design and usability sins on the Web,
the kind of obvious no-no that should have gone out with blinky text,
dancing cat animations, and autoplaying music. It shows constant, quiet
contempt for people who should be any news site’s highest
priority—folks who want to read articles all the way to the end.

Manjoo writes with tongue (slightly) in cheek, but he's pretty much
right.

How to Fix Everything in America Forever

The proprietor of the wonderful website IMAO has written another book,
available for the low, low price of (as I type) $4.74 for Amazon's
Kindle. Just click on the book jacket over there, and do what Amazon
tells you. Pick up a Kindle while you're there, if necessary. (Pick up
another Kindle if not necessary. I get a cut.)

Frank's subtitle is "The Plan to Keep America Awesome", and he's
not exaggerating. Just a few recommendations, picked at random:

Forget going for "a shining city on a hill." While that was
OK for Reagan,
Frank's overall goal: an America so awesome that foreigners
should "scream in pain if they dare to gaze upon it."

The president should not be elected, but picked from experienced
past presidents
of smaller countries, kind of like NFL quarterbacks are picked from
the college ranks. Then: "Hide him away in a bunker somewhere and tell
him to keep an eye on other countries and leave us alone."

Pain collars on legislators. That's such an obviously good idea it needs
no explanation.

A special holiday every four years: Regime Change Day. "Americans
will pick one evil dictator to overthrow. Whomever we like the
least. He'll be awakened by loudspeakers announcing, "Happy Regime
Change Day!" followed by explosions."

Stop coddling the kids. For example, teach them all kung fu. Why?
"We could have a generation that if suddenly attacked by ninjas,
would just sink into a fighting stance, ready to do battle. That's a
group of kids no one is going to mess with. We want the next generation
not to shrink from challenges but instead be ready to roundhouse-kick
them in the face."

Put scientists to work on new weapon systems.
Specifically: genetically-resurrected
dinosaurs with rocket launchers mounted on their backs. Another
obviously good idea.

A simple reform for homeland
security: whoever spots the most terrorists gets a free hat.

Punch your inner hippie.

It's short, because Frank doesn't feel the need to screw around
with the usual political book fripperies, such as: considering
what others have said on the issue under discussion; gathering
supporting evidence for one's assertions; dealing with possible
objections; showing that one's proposals are feasible in the real world.
Stuff like that. Who cares?

It's
consistently amusing. Consumer note:
If I had to do it over again, I'd read it slower, probably only
a chapter per day. For the same reason that I don't eat a dozen
Krispy Kremes in one sitting: the twelfth one isn't quite
as satisfying.

Disclaimers:
Unquoted opinions expressed herein are solely those of the
blogger.

Pun Salad is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates
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